The Fall
by Hatsya
Summary: Delphini has only one purpose as long as she can remember, and she has failed. Fallen from the promise of her father's legacy, she has nothing but the ever bleak reminders of her failures. Imprisoned for life in Azkaban and cut off from magic, Delphini must come to terms with her new situation and her new self.


The man who enters the cellblock tells the Auror off with a whispered word. The plain young woman with a fierce scar across half her face—a mark from a recent scuffle with a Death Eater, if Delphi had to guess—bows her head in respect before leaking the door unguarded for just the pair of them.

No one had walked into her cellblock for a long time, and the portly man with small, careful steps seems an unlikely figure to make the brave inroads. She can taste the scent of him in the air, of sweat and soil. A working man. Yet, his clothes speak another story. A muggle suit. The aroma of wet wool carries well.

It is raining outside.

Beneath all the stone surrounding her, Delphi could not hear the pitter patter of raindrops. She was encased in a tomb.

The man, who drapes a wet overcoat next to him as he sits on a bench, is about forty. The beginning of age spreading like rot across his face, yet there is something almost infantile about the fat around his cheeks. It is a disgusting paradox.

Delphi knows two things. First, he is important, respected by the wizarding community. He had unrestrained access to her after all. Second, he is rubbish at magic.

Another disgusting paradox.

"Hello," the man says. "You like to be called Delphi, is that correct?"

Delphi says nothing, only observing. He has a wand at his side she can spot through his suit as he leans forward. He is still a wizard then, if a sod of one. You could never be sure these days. Modern fashions often made it hard to tell the difference from far away. It was sickening, really, to have the whole lot of them behaving like muggles. It was like aping after dogs by running on all fours. The thought churned her stomach.

And now, this disgusting paradox of a four-legged man, this abomination of a wizard, is sitting across from her, all power and privilege in his three-piece muggle suit. She stands beneath, behind bars and spells thick enough to see, cast down into muck. He has the audacity to smile at her, to use a pet name. She can feel the heel of his muggle boot grinding her deeper into the mud.

"You don't need to say anything. I—I have heard you might be out of practice. Harry's been very tightlipped about your imprisonment and identity, but my wife, she owns the Leaky Cauldron, which keeps secret about as well as—well," he pauses a moment, lost in thought while searching for a turn of phrase. The gears in head ground oh-so-slowly.

How can she have been reduced to this?

He knows Harry Potter. That must be what gives him power and allows him to be treated like an idol even if he is but an idiot dolt. But, then again, they all are idiot dolts.

Delphi is still waiting to find evidence for how the lumbering lummoxes she had met could even think to stand against the valor and power of her father.

Perhaps time had weakened them, and she saw them not at their zenith but at their nadir. Weeds grow rank without a gardener. That's all they were, weeds weakened by time.

Time would weaken her.

She'd stopped eating yesterday.

When the man finally found the phrase he was looking for, his eyes went alight like a child amazed at the return of his mother's face in peek-a-boo. "As well as a leaky cauldron." His smile was sloppy. She hated him.

He grows sober beneath her baleful glare. He sighs, pushing a hand back though the little hair he had remaining. "I made Harry promise me to let me see you, but he said he would only let me once you had gone quiet. And now, you have. So, I'm here."

He pulls the bench a little closer, as if nearsighted and wanting to see her face. He probably was myopic and too rubbish at magic to do a damned thing about it. And now this old, fat, stupid baby was staring at her between the bars of her cell, like sticky toddler pressing his nose against the orangutan enclosure at a zoo.

"I wanted to apologize, Delphi," he says. He lowers his head now even as Delphi tries to take a closer look at the man, seeking information on how to decode his statement. "For all of us. For everything that's happened to you. I'm sorry that you never had a father because my friend killed him. I'm sorry that you never had a mother because my friend's mother killed her. I'm sorry that you're here."

She is surprised to see his head turn upward so suddenly. She feels instinctively for a wand that is never there. She curses herself for the motion. She can see the triumph in the man's eyes at catching her unawares, for being made the fool by an insufferable, muggle-loving fool.

"Harry's the bravest man I've ever known, but he sees the world as black and white. He's an Auror; it's part of his job description. He find the black, and well, puts in Azkaban to wash his hands of. He's very good at it, the best, they say. He can treat the wizarding world like a chessboard, battling against the opposing side with finesse and alacrity."

Luck, it was all luck. Harry had the finesse of a drunk dugbog and the alacrity of a dementor. If the world were based on ability or fairness, then Delphi would not be sitting her, being showered by the verbal vomit an infant senior citizen. Delphi did not belong here.

"But me, well, I'm a professor. I work with children. There are no opposing sides. I might have good and bad students, but I don't lock the bad ones up on an island and forget about them. I can't. Whether good or bad, they come back into my greenhouse day-after-day, so instead we must work together."

She realizes the reason for his presence here with revulsion. She is not a talented, dark witch who had almost brought forth a third age for her father's revolution. No, she is a truculent toddler in a temper tantrum, and now, the good-hearted professor was here to turn her all around and be best of friends ever after.

"I—I like to think my students are like plants. Some come to me already well watered and in full bloom; I could do nothing, and they would still produce wonderful fruits. Others did not always have the same luxuries. Some are wilted from years, decades of neglect. Many, I have found are etiolated from the shadows they have grown in. War leaves a lot of legacies."

She isn't even human now, but some little sprout crushed before it had even broken through the soil—by a load of manure it would seem from the circumstances. Much to her chagrin, the man is unperturbed in his continued monologue by neither her stare nor her silence. Indeed, he takes the silence as invitation to continue speaking.

"My parents left me a legacy. They were war heroes as well. They've been, well, indisposed since I was a baby. My grandmother raised me, but all she really wanted to do was to raise her son again, and I wasn't him. He was a skilled Auror, and I—I liked my books and my plants. Magic only came with great difficulty."

He chuckles with an avuncular smile that Delphi detests. If the bars did not exist between them, she has no doubt he would pull her into his arms and rustle her hair. "If rumor is right, that does not seem to be any sort of a problem for you, but it was for me. I had to try very, very hard to be what my father was.

"And I did, in a way. I learned to duel. I fought in the war. I even became an Auror, just like my father. It felt great, honestly. My grandmother loved me. My friends loved me. It was as if there was this role written for me, and soon as I got up and filled it, the crowd would cheer. My life was this play, or a puppet show, and I just needed to dance like a marionette on a string."

He fought in the war, against her father. Has Delphi heard stories of him? He would have been young then, one of Potter's cohort.

"I went to see my father, at St. Mungo's, where he's being treated. He's not quite there anymore, but he knows me, a little. He knows I'm a friend. Both him and my mum do. When he saw me, he would touch my face, tracing the new scars I'd gotten. My mum wept onto my shoulder, hugging me tight. It made me realize all the exhaustion and sadness I had there, welling up in my chest. All the stress and the agony of trying to fill a role that was never mine to wear."

He sits back.

"I was done."

The Longbottoms. Rodolphus Lestrange had told her about them. It was their torture that him and her mother had been prosecuted for and locked up in Azkaban before the second war. They had dementors guarding it back then. Rodolphus mentioned her mother was never quite the same afterward.

This man's parents had put her mother in Azkaban.

"If my father had been himself, perhaps he would not have been so kind. I know my grandmother was not. She still hasn't forgiven me for it, reneging on my legacy. My wife, Hannah, think she'll come around, but I'm not so sure. I've grown distant from many of the friends I had while working at the Ministry, and instead I spend most of my time with often ungrateful children."

The sniveling Longbottom has come to gloat over her; to reach down offer benediction like a muggle priest on high; and to underline that even he, a glorified children's schoolmarm who had forsaken any chance at glory for snotty noses, stands above her.

"But, I'm happy. I've found a life outside that role that was cast for me. We don't have to become who we were born to be. Sometimes, we can become someone new entirely, although it can be difficult to decide exactly who to become. I know it was for me. I agonized over decisions, because I did not want to make the wrong one and be unable to go back to who I used to be. Some decisions cannot be taken back."

He did not agonize long enough, considering the results of his decisions. Or perhaps Delphi should not put him at fault for the time he put into his decisions; it would appear the speed of his mental processes is the fatal flaw. He speaks slowly, carefully, weighing each word like a miserly goblin would measure out gold.

He pauses, again, the gears in his head slowly turning.

"Delphi, I knew Craig Bowker, the student you killed at Hogwarts. He was a good lad, did well in his classes, and was punctilious to a fault. His parents loved him very much. Amelia, his little sister, has been having trouble in her classes since his passing. We're supporting her as much as we can, but perhaps not as much as Craig would have. Craig is a decision you cannot take back."

She doesn't know what he expects from her. Sorrow? Shame? Abnegation? If she had felt any of those things at all, it was when she was a child, long ago. Some emotions, she had learned, should be discarded as useless.

She'd kept hate and fury. They keep her warm.

"But, I've also learned that life isn't a set of scales where the bad things we have done are weighed against the good. It's not a chess match where the key to winning is to defeat the opposing side. It's not a play, with roles prewritten for us as protagonists and antagonists and a clean climax and dénouement. It's, well, it's life, in all its glory and splendor, its messiness and disorganization. The decisions we make help build the future we share, and there's always time for new decisions."

It is easy for him to say. The decisions she makes now are mostly bodily: where to walk, to look, to see. Whether to eat or not. She is not part of a future; she is a spectator for its fall. Even then, she cannot see the disintegration of magical society due to its internal pollution when imprisoned behind these walls.

She cannot even hear the rain.

"I'm sorry, but it looks like I'm out of time to chat. Harry is still Harry, and he was very firm on your restrictions," Longbottom says. He gets to his feet with a small groan. It is like watching a weathered, bas-relief cherub pull itself from a frieze. He beats the water off his overcoat in a singularly muggle gesture before returning it to his shoulders.

She can imagine why his grandmother might be so disappointed in him. Her mother was a blessing to his that the Longbottom did not have to realize what became of her son. It is obvious that he was putting his wand to no great use, but imagine the things that Delphi could do with it.

There were so many things that Delphi could be.

"I'll stop by again sometime, Delphi," Longbottom said over his shoulder as he reaches for the door.

"It's Delphini, Longbottom," Delphi says. She does not need to shout. She knows how her voice, her mother's voice, carries.

Delphi is reticent to admit there in fluidity in the movement and velocity she had not expected as he draws his wands and spins on a dime. He did learn to duel and duel well. His wand is pointed straight at her heart before he seems to realize his actions. The retired soldier, turned pacifist, cannot stray to far from his past. No one can. Delphi knows that, even if Longbottom doesn't.

Righteous worldviews are so fragile, and Delphi can't help but smile as she watches them burn.

His face is as rubicund as blood. His shoulders are straight, and through his eye, she can watch him process the inconsistencies in his logic, brought forth by three little words. She watches his emotions race behind his stolid, red visage: fear, hate, anger, disappointment, and sorrow.

Suddenly, the windows of his eyes brighten. He sheathes his wand, fumbling slightly with his coat. He meets her smile, genuinely, as Delphi feels her grin melt off her face.

"Then call me Neville, Delphini," the man says.


End file.
